Microsoft Previews IE9

Microsoft released a platform preview of IE9 at its annual MIX10 developers conference in Las Vegas.

"We saw how HTML5 enabled a whole new class of applications," Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's IE group, told attendees here Tuesday. "We quickly realized to do it right, which is our intent, our focus was more around designing what HTML5 apps will need so they will feel more like real apps than Web pages."

To make it happen, Microsoft is relying on high-performance graphics chips and other PC hardware to accelerate the delivery of graphics, video and text so developers can begin building the most powerful and rich applications possible in HTML5.

"Developers, raise your expectations," Hachamovitch said.

"We've built Internet Explorer 9 from the ground up on top of the Windows 7 platform," Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows division, said during a demo. "We're all in."

IE9 will have support for CSS3, the style sheet language used to describe presentation semantics of documents written in markup language, and for SVG 1.1 imagery inline.

Hachamovitch said Microsoft will update the browser code every eight weeks until it releases a beta version at some undetermined date down the road. It will include new Web standards such as plug-in-free video and a new JavaScript engine called Chakra that will compile data in the background to improve performance without changing pages or code.

Microsoft showed off the early iteration of IE9, running a series of graphics-rich demos that showed its new browser was faster than some of its competitors.

Speaking of competitors, Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, was gracious enough to tweet some encouraging words during the keynote address, saying "IE9 looks great, very glad to see it."